Welcome to the 'Great Acceleration': how a faster world is helping to make us all richer

Larger cities require more bodies and more innovation which is why places such as London are so creative and exciting

Adam Petto

One of the fundamental rules of human behaviour is that the larger the community, the faster people move. A child brought up in a city will race around a supermarket more than twice as fast as his cousin from a small town.

Cities are places of greater speed and less patience. But there's more to them than that. Just as the pace of our lives scales up alongside the size of our community, so do levels of innovation, productivity and income.

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This process, according to the British physicist Geoffrey West, obeys a simple law. The increase in social interactions - caused, in part, by the fact that we are moving more quickly and bumping into each other more frequently - results in the size of a city's economy rising much more rapidly than its population. Put someone in a city twice as large as their hometown, and they become 15 per cent more productive. Even better, economies of scale mean they will do so at less of a cost: when a city doubles in size, its use of resources rises by only 85 per cent.

It's not all good news: the fact that we're more social in large numbers also means that we commit more crimes, contract more diseases and so on. But by and large, this process is a very good thing. And the cycle feeds on itself: larger cities require more bodies and more innovation to keep the system running, pulling more and more people into the accelerated lifestyle.

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This process helps explain why places such as London develop their massive advantage over their hinterland: they are so buzzy and creative and exciting that to move to the country, or even to a smaller city, slows your life down. Leaving the "rat race" may work for some - but for others, it is intolerable.

The power of cities also matters for humanity's future. As PD Smith writes in his book City, "unless there is some unforeseen global catastrophe, the 21st century looks set to experience the greatest flowering of urban civilisation in history". By 2050, it is expected that more than six billion people - or up to three quarters of the planet's inhabitants - will be urbanites.

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This will be a world not just of cities, but of mega-cities. We can already see the bones of the urban superstructures emerging, as Rio gropes its way towards São Paulo; Mexico City swells to consume the centre of its nation; or China's eastern seaboard becomes one long stream of glittering lights.

And this is, by and large, fantastic news. Cities are the places where we can gain access to the speed we crave, to hyperlocal delivery and hyperfast broadband and, more importantly, to jobs and opportunity.

The greatest impact will be felt in the east. Today, there are 28 cities with a population of more than ten million people. By 2030, the UN predicts there will be 41 - and more than half of them will be in Asia. In India, as ambition pulls and poverty pushes, urban populations will almost double over the next 20 years, with some 240 million people moving from country to city. China recently announced a plan to build another mega-city around Beijing, containing a third as many people as in the entire United States. In just a decade's time, China will have 221 cities of more than a million people. There are only 35 such cities in the EU today.

The nightmare scenario - which appears to be happening in parts of Africa - is that this great process of urbanisation outpaces economic growth, with many of the new arrivals dumped in slums and shanty towns. Yet a more optimistic vision, given the rapid economic progress of recent decades, is of a world of Londons or New Yorks - great cosmopolitan cities in which members of the new global middle class can work and play and collide.

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This also suggests that fears over the death of innovation, a topic which economists have been fretting about, may be overblown. Perhaps it is getting harder to come up with new ideas. But there will be billions more people doing the thinking, as the ranks of the educated urban middle classes swell and swell.

From Charles Dickens's Victorian sweatshops to the tower blocks of JG Ballard's High-Rise, we've been conditioned to think of cities as frightening, impersonal places. But actually, they're where we get to be our best selves - to come up with more ideas, to make more money and to have more fun. That's also what makes them the dynamos that will not just entrench the acceleration of our lives, but push it further on.

Robert Colvile is the author of The Great Acceleration: How the World is Getting Faster, Faster (Bloomsbury)